Having to run Broomstick without GPU support while I try to upgrade my ancient Dell has led me to wonder about performance. 

It seems to me that Broomstick without GPU support runs faster than Away3DLite version 1.0.2 (Flash Player 10).  Is this just wishful thinking or is it expected to be quicker? If so does anyone have any idea how much quicker?

I have also noticed a number of strange anomalies that may or may not be due to running in software mode.  Given that I’m probably one of the few people daft enough to be working with Broomstick without hardware support, I thought it might be worth reporting them.

I am displaying an aircraft with a transparent cockpit cover which I have exported as an AWD1 file from preFab.  The transparency is fine in Away3DLite, but in Broomstick other parts of the aircraft become transparent.

Another problem is when using a DirectionalLight or PointLight the aircraft’s material becomes very distorted in places (it’s fine if I don’t use lights).

Finally, I added a plane to the aircraft at runtime to serve as a propeller.  The idea was to rotate the plane around the x axis to make the propeller spin.  However, whether using rotationX or rotate(Vector3D.X_AXIS, 1) the rotation is always identical to rotation about the Z axis.

Despite these problems, experimenting with Broomstick is as much fun as working with Away3D always is - even without hardware support!

Regards,

John Wilson

Hey John

thanx for taking the time to work out some of the discrepacies between software and hardware mode for Away3D 4.0!

The software renderer in Flash 11 Incubator is designed specifically to render GPU based commands, as as a result is significantly faster than the old 3D rendering approach in Flash 10 (used by Away3D Lite). While i don’t have any accurate benchmarks on this difference, from what i’ve seen i would say it is at least 10 times faster, but of course GPU rendering with the right optimisations can be up to 1000 times faster than Flash 10 so it is always worth picking the GPU option when available

The anomalies you mention are something worth picking up with Adobe - they have a bugbase at http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/ with a special option to select when reporting Incubator build bugs. I would recommend you submit anything that appears incorrect as a bug report here - including the source necessary to reproduce if at all possible.

cheers

Rob